April, 2006, Volume
10, Number 7
CONTENTS
Leading with Resilience: iRobot’s Helen Greiner
Leadership of Change: Privatizing Foreign Aid
Believing is Seeing: A Mountaineer Talks To Business About Overcoming
Adversity
Leading with Resilience:
iRobot’s Helen Greiner
Working at the intersection of unproven technology
and untested markets, iRobot founder Helen Greiner has had her
resilience tested many times since founding the company in 1990 with
partners Colin Angle and Rodney Brooks. “We call them learning
experiences,” said Greiner, during a recent interview with editors from
Knowledge@Wharton. She will be one of the speakers at the Tenth
Annual Wharton Leadership Conference on June 13 on
Leading With Resilience: Coming Back from Challenge and Adversity.
“Early
on, we absolutely had to ship a robot and we built it ourselves,” she
said. “If it didn’t ship that day, everything was going to end. We
couldn’t pay our bills. And it burst into flames at 3 o’clock in the
morning while we were working on it. What that told me was that I
really have two wonderful business partners. We all burst out laughing
and we went to Burger King and just started rebuilding it the next day.”
They went on to create a $95 million company that
has moved robots from sci-fi to Best Buy. They have sold more than 1.5
million floor-cleaning Roomba robots, more than 300 military robots
deployed in Iraq and even an archeological robot used to explore the
Great Pyramids of Egypt.
For their first decade in business, however, there
were considered dreamers. Their passion for the company and the
technology were constantly put to the test. “When we started the
company, we were un-fundable from a venture capital point of view,”
Greiner said. “It was really not until eight years in that we even
tried to get venture capital funding. I can say that I’ve been turned
down by almost every major VC in the country except for the five really
visionary and foresighted ones who joined us. I can tell you today that
one of the things today that really makes me happy is I’ve had a lot of
venture capitalists come up to me and say, ‘Helen, I was wrong. Robots
are the next big thing.’ ”
In addition to Greiner, the Leadership Conference
will feature filmmaker and mountaineer David Breashears (Seven Years
in Tibet and Cliffhanger); cardiologist Roberto Canessa whose
story of the 1972 crash and rescue of his rugby team in the Andes was
featured in the book and film Alive; Jim Colins, author of
Built to Last and Good to Great; Peter Dawkins, Vice Chairman
of CitiGroup Private Bank and former Chairman/CEO Primerica Financial
Services, Inc.; Sylvia M. Montero, Senior Vice President of Human
Resources at Pfizer Inc.; David Pottruck, CEO of Red Eagle Ventures and
former CEO of Charles Schwab; and Wharton Professor Michael Useem,
director of the Wharton Center for Leadership and Change.
The one-day intensive conference on June 13 at the
Wharton School in Philadelphia is devoted to exchanging ideas about how
managers can lead with resilience and come back from challenge and
adversity, whether in the private, public, or nonprofit sectors.
Presenters will draw upon their own experiences and those of others who
have faced difficult decisions under demanding circumstances. They will
identify the capabilities that are required to lead a group or
organization through an uncertain and challenging period – and the
personal capacities essential for remaining affirmative and persistent
in an unpredictable and stressful environment.
Leadership
of Change:
Privatizing Foreign Aid
By
Carol Adelman
Governments of industrialized nations have given
developing countries more than $2.3 trillion in foreign aid over the
last 50 years. However good the intentions – has it been effective?
And is it really the true measure of Western generosity? Not really.
Western governments and U.N. officials, since the
Marshall Plan have held to the view that increasing official aid would
lift poor nations out of poverty just as it did post-war Europeans. The
U.N. and the OECD, a Paris-based group of 22 donor nations, encourage
governments to spend 0.7 percent of their gross national incomes on
foreign aid.
On this criterion, the U.S. has ranked poorly. The
latest data (from 2004) show that the U.S. comes in second to last, just
ahead of Italy. But the measure is incomplete, for it excludes American
private giving abroad from foundations, corporations, voluntary
organizations, universities and colleges, religious organizations, and
the many immigrants who send money back to their home countries.
To understand the magnitude of this giving, the
Center for Global Prosperity at the Hudson Institute has just launched
the first Index of Global Philanthropy. This in-depth study of
U.S. private giving to the developing world combines existing surveys
with original research, tallying the true magnitude of American
generosity.
In 2004, private giving to poor countries totaled
at least – more than three and a half times U.S. “official” foreign aid.
What it shows is that Americans prefer to give abroad as they do at
home – privately – while Europeans assist people overseas as they do
domestically – mainly through their governments.
U.S. international private giving comes close to
the $79 billion of all official foreign aid from all donor nations
combined. Private giving and volunteerism from U.S. foundations and
other non-governmental organizations alone – such as CARE, World Vision,
and Catholic Relief Services – top $13 billion. This far exceeds
official aid from other donor countries.
The new breed of “philanthrocapitalists,” with
“soft heart, hard head” approaches, are bringing business techniques,
accountability, transparency, and results to remote villages in need.
Corporations and churches are moving beyond relief projects to create
lasting institutions in developing countries.
Having seen the benefits of people-to-people
programs over traditional donor government-to-government approaches,
Dennis Whittle, former World Bank employee, founded GlobalGiving, an
on-line marketplace where donors are “customers” who “shop” for their
preferred development projects. Complete with a “Giving Cart,”
GlobalGiving connects individuals, corporate, and other donors with
development projects throughout the world. These projects compete for
funds at a fraction of the normal aid-project overhead. Donors can
track their funded projects’ progress through regular Internet updates.
Whittle wants the capital to flow to those entrepreneurs who
demonstrate results – something sorely missing from traditional aid
projects.
Martin Fisher and Nick Moon of the American
non-profit KickStart became fed up with traditional government aid
programs. “We’re putting in place things that are really not
sustainable,” says Fisher about the old approach, “because the minute we
go away, these things just collapse.” They developed a small pressure
irrigation pump, called the MoneyMaker, which resembles a rudimentary
stair-climbing exercise machine by which an African farmer pumps
irrigation water throughout his plot. The Moneymaker has increased
average incomes among the farmers from $120 to $1,400 and created 35,000
new jobs in East Africa.
Foreign aid, like most sectors, has been gradually
“privatizing” over the last twenty years. Counting foreign aid only when
it comes from governments is to be caught in the time warp of Marshall
Plan-era thinking when both private investments and charity abroad were
minimal. There is a new world of giving, which sees poor people as
active partners, not as helpless pawns waiting for the next cash
installment. The world’s attitude toward foreign aid, private giving,
and creating prosperity needs a dramatic make-over before poverty can be
reduced in a far-reaching and lasting way.
Note: Carol Adelman is director of the
Center for Global Prosperity at the Hudson Institue and served as
Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development
in charge of Middle East, Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe. She is
currently serving as Vice Chairman of the H.E.L.P. Commission, a
bi-partisan government commission to reform foreign aid. For
information on her study, click
here or contact
Samantha Grayson at
samantha@hudson.org.
Believing is Seeing:
A Mountaineer Talks To Business About Overcoming Adversity
By Chris Maxwell
As if climbing Mt. Everest in 2001 was not
achievement enough, blind climber Erik Weihenmayer has now completed his
bid to climb the Seven Summits – the highest mountain on each
continent. Speaking to an audience of financial specialists at Merrill
Lynch in Princeton, NJ, he recounted his struggles to overcome
adversity, suggesting “everyone can lead – leadership is contagious.”
Moving from the comfort of modern-day life to face
the challenges of high-altitude mountaineering without sight requires
harnessing the energy of adversity “like an alchemist,” Weihenmayer
says. One intriguing lesson he learned after an unsuccessful bid to
climb Nepal’s 22,494 ft Ama Dablam is that “adversity is not the
obstacle, but the pathway.” Weihenmayer celebrates every step of his
journeys, both the easy and the difficult, and he’s learned to seek team
members who are prepared to face and overcome fear and uncertainty
together in tough conditions. Tackling adversity, Weihenmayer suggests,
makes team members more focused, driven, and creative.
Brad Olson, CFO, Merrill Lynch Global Private
Client, said he sees real value in developmental experiences “that are
challenging, rewarding, and leave participants with honed leadership and
problem-solving skills.” Weihenmayer told his audience that a firm can
also harness the energy of overcoming uncertainty and hardship in much
the same manner as mountaineers – linked together as climbers are roped
together on a mountain, inspired by a common vision and following a
common purpose, working interdependently to face and overcome adversity.
Weihenmayer also thinks visualizing a firm this way helps people believe
they can do things they didn’t think possible and that they can push
themselves well beyond their own expectations. With a wry smile, he
told the analysts, “Believing is seeing.”
Note: Chris Maxwell is Associate Director
of the Wharton Undergraduate Leadership Program and he can be reached at
maxwellc@wharton.upenn.edu. Erik Weihenmayer spoke to the Global
Private Client Group at Merrill Lynch headquarters in Princeton, NJ, on
January 20, 2006. The Merrill Lynch Chief Financial Office is the
sponsor of
Wharton Leadership Ventures Grand Teton Mountaineering 2006.
Copyright 1996-2006, Wharton Center for
Leadership and Change Management
University
of Pennsylvania
